Movies

OPENING

BEOWULF

Blending live action and animation, Robert Zemeckis directed this adaptation, by the screenwriters Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary, of the Old English epic poem, about the warrior who fights the monster Grendel. Starring Angelina Jolie and Ray Winstone. Opening Nov. 16. (In wide release.)

Reviewed this week in The Current Cinema. Opening Nov. 16. (In wide release.)

SOUTHLAND TALES

A science-fiction drama, directed by Richard Kelly, about a diverse group of people in Los Angeles who attempt to cope with environmental disaster. Opening Nov. 14. (Angelika Film Center and Empire 25.)

WHAT WOULD JESUS BUY?

A documentary by Rob VanAlke made about Reverend Billy and his Church of Stop Shopping, an anti-corporate performance group. Opening Nov. 16. (Cinema Village.)

NOW PLAYING

AMERICAN GANGSTER

Dazzling, swift-moving, shallow. We see the rise of the real-life Harlem gangster Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington), who in 1968 went to Northern Thailand, purchased uncut heroin, shipped it to New York, and sold it on the streets at twice the strength and half the price of what the Mafia was selling. Like many modern gangsters, Frank wants to lead an orderly and loving family life and to keep it untainted by what he does. Opposing Frank is the real-life police detective Richie Roberts (Russell Crowe), who hunts Frank down with a group of irregulars (that is, honest cops) operating out of Essex County, New Jersey. Until Frank and Richie’s final confrontation, the scenes are brief and emblematic, though the director, Ridley Scott, filming in the street or at clubs and parties, packs as much as he can into the corners and backgrounds of shots and decisively shapes even the most casual moments. “American Gangster” has been made with great panache and drive. But the portrait of Frank never goes beyond admiration of his cleverness, his style, and his entrepreneurial skill, and one comes away with such sour questions as “Why is it supposed to be better that hundreds—maybe thousands—of lives were destroyed in Harlem by black rather than Italian gangsters?” Written by Steven Zaillian and based on a 2000 New York magazine piece by Mark Jacobson. With Ruby Dee, Chiwetel Ejiofor, John Ortiz, Cuba Gooding, Jr., and Josh Brolin.—David Denby (Reviewed in our issue of 11/5/07.) (In wide release.)

BEE MOVIE

Jerry Seinfeld joins the hive at DreamWorks Animation for this mediocre tale about a bee (Seinfeld) who falls for a florist (Renée Zellweger) while out on a mission to prove his individuality. Seinfeld’s exaggerated delivery gives the movie some bounce, but there’s little cohesion to the script, which involves captive bees making honey for an evil entrepreneur, courtroom high jinks, and interspecies romance. Visually, the movie (directed by Simon J. Smith and Steve Hickner) is shiny and bright and lovely, even with the non-stop puns and movie references getting in the way. The supporting voices include Chris Rock, Matthew Broderick, and, of course, Sting.—Bruce Diones (In wide release.)

BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU’RE DEAD

In Sidney Lumet’s furious and entertaining little morality play, two men hard up for cash—Andy (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a payroll manager at a Manhattan real-estate company, and his not very bright kid brother, Hank (Ethan Hawke)—decide to knock over their parents’ jewelry store in Westchester, and everything goes wrong. The movie, written by Kelly Masterson, has an unusual construction: it reaches a climactic moment, then jumps back a few days to lay out the story from the point of view of one character or another. The fractured time scheme brings out the unsurprising but still enlightening lesson that crime should be left to the professionals, and that greed humbles smart-asses like Andy, who think they’re invulnerable. If the material had been underplayed, or done as cool, sly satire, its moral and psychological patterns would have seemed obvious and trite. But the excitable Lumet, now eighty-three, pitches the performances as high as he can, and this feels right. He’s made an old man’s malicious joke about the universality of folly. With Albert Finney as the boys’ frightening dad.—D.D. (10/29/07) (In wide release.)

DAN IN REAL LIFE

Steve Carell and Juliette Binoche bring life to this gently comic drama, directed by Peter Hedges (“Pieces of April”). Dan (Carell) is an advice columnist, a widower, and a strict but beleaguered father of three daughters, two of them teen-agers. When he takes them to visit his large extended family at his parents’ vacation home, he meets Marie (a wonderfully loose Binoche), who happens to be dating his brother (Dane Cook). Amidst the seemingly endless family activities, Dan falls in love with Marie, his focus interrupted only by a brief stint with a neighbor’s feisty, high-achieving daughter (the fantastic Emily Blunt). The impressive cast features topnotch actors—including Dianne Wiest, John Mahoney, Alison Pill, and Norbert Leo Butz—who are limited by their one-dimensional roles, and Hedges offers disappointingly simplistic resolutions for every problem. But for fans of Carell and Binoche, who are paired with some success here, the film may prove a guilty pleasure.—Shauna Lyon (In wide release.)

THE DARJEELING LIMITED

The new Wes Anderson film shows that his fixation on families, and on the ties that bind them, continues unabated. Three brothers, played by Adrien Brody, Jason Schwartzman, and Owen Wilson, meet up on a slow train rattling across India. They are mourning the death of their father, planning a vague pilgrimage to their mother (Anjelica Huston), who has herself moved to Asia, and trying to repair their fellowship. The movie steams with minor resentments and misunderstandings that slowly evaporate in the warm-colored, calmative surroundings of an unfamiliar land. It is easy to be exasperated by the brothers’ pettiness, but Anderson is one of the few contemporary directors with the nerve to insist that the blandishments of style—in his case, stately tracking shots, sudden romantic songs, and twitchy running gags—can lend form and grace to even the most discontented lives. With a fine opening cameo from Bill Murray, which leaves you wanting more.—Anthony Lane (10/15/07) (In wide release.)

DIVORCE—ITALIAN STYLE

When two individualistic comic masterminds like Marcello Mastroianni and the director Pietro Germi meet, it’s not often that they produce something as wild and wonderful as this black comedy, about the lengths a man will go to rid himself of a wife in Sicily, circa 1961. Baron Ferdinando Cefalù (Mastroianni) feels stifled in his marriage to the smothering Rosalia (Daniela Rocca) and longs for his nubile, willing sixteen-year-old cousin Angela (Stefania Sandrelli). Divorce is impossible, but inducing a wife to stray and murdering her to defend his manly honor would free a husband from marital bondage with the meagre cost of a fleeting prison term. Mastroianni, Germi, and the co-writers, Ennio De Concini and Alfredo Giannetti, go so far into the dementia of masculine desire that they end up satirizing every subject they touch. The seedy inertia of small-town aristocrats, the self-deceiving power of erotic angst, even the hilarious gap between ideology and sexual politics get sent up—and soar straight into the stratosphere. Germi’s visual and storytelling style is fluid, bold, and full of contrast, and Mastroianni is marvellous as a man who himself plays several roles: ennui-ridden local royalty, concerned husband, humiliated cuckold, and a romantic willing to give all for love. (The script won the Best Original Screenplay Oscar in 1962.)—Michael Sragow (Film Forum.)

FRED CLAUS

The clever idea of giving Santa a family and a Rosebud-like backstory turned into this noisy, bloated, humorless comedy. As the clock ticks down to Christmas, the stressed-out St. Nicholas Claus (Paul Giamatti) persuades his resentful and estranged older brother, Fred (Vince Vaughn), a motormouthed Chicago repo man, to pay him a visit at the North Pole. It turns out to be a company town inhabited mainly by elves whose saccharine ways the cynical Fred, laboring alongside them, tries to shake up. Then a Scrooge-like efficiency expert (Kevin Spacey) shows up and declares the whole outfit on probation, and when Fred, sorting children’s letters as “naughty” or “nice,” commits a revolutionary act of tolerance—deciding that all children should be considered nice and, thus, worthy of Christmas presents—the entire enterprise is put at risk. Ultimately, of course, family loyalty wins out, Fred saves the day, and both he and Santa learn from the experience. Yet in the interstices of this bland and formulaic tale is the startling fantasy of Fred’s liberalized consumerist Christianity covering the globe through his “Top Gun”-like sleigh-piloting. Directed by David Dobkin.—Richard Brody (In wide release.)

GONE BABY GONE

In his début film as a feature director, Ben Affleck turns to the gloomy streets of working-class Dorchester. A baby girl belonging to the world’s worst mother (Amy Ryan) gets snatched, and a local tough kid who has become a private investigator (Casey Affleck), accompanied by his girlfriend (Michelle Monaghan), look for the child in some of the city’s most surly locations. The movie turns into a complicated thriller involving the mother’s disapproving family and some very emotional Boston policemen who are obsessed with protecting children. At times, the genre conventions (the material comes out of an early Dennis Lehane thriller) are at odds with the movie’s authentic, lived-in look, but Affleck, as a director, has no fear of gazing into the abyss, and he gets some very good actors to follow him. With Morgan Freeman and Ed Harris at his feverish best.—D.D. (10/29/07) (In wide release.)

LIONS FOR LAMBS

Not so much a coherent movie as a triptych of related tales, two of them dangerously static. In Washington, an experienced liberal reporter (Meryl Streep) goes head to head with an eager young senator (Tom Cruise), who is backing a new military push in Afghanistan. In California, a college professor (Robert Redford) tries to spur a feckless student (Andrew Garfield) to involve himself more boldly in the world, whatever form that may take. And in Afghanistan itself, a couple of the professor’s former students (Derek Luke and Michael Peña), now serving with the American forces, find themselves stranded on a dark hillside with the enemy approaching. The soldiers’ predicament, to which we return throughout the film, is intended to dramatize the issues being debated back home, although their heroism has few political implications, being more an example of indissoluble friendship. In short, the movie, written by Matthew Michael Carnahan and directed by Redford, has all the indignation of a wake-up call but no clear idea as to what we should be doing once awake. By a pleasing irony, Tom Cruise, turning his terrifying smile up to maximum, emerges as the most convincing figure in sight. Was that really part of the plan?—A.L. (11/12/07) (In wide release.)

LOVE STREAMS

With the self-excoriating casting of himself and his wife, Gena Rowlands, as brother and sister, John Cassavetes, in his last film as writer-director, conjures a heady mood of romantic apocalypse. A successful writer of books about women, Robert Harmon (Cassavetes) fills his suburban Los Angeles home with playgirls, whom he interrogates about their secrets, and he trawls cabarets for research on a book about night life. His sister, Sarah (Rowlands), lives in Chicago, where she has been in and out of mental institutions; miserably divorced, she loses custody of her teen-age daughter, yet keeps her wounded, cockeyed optimism. After Robert’s disastrous reunion with the eight-year-old son he’d never seen, Sarah drops in—with two taxis full of baggage—for an open-ended stay. In hypnotically long scenes of a musical ebb and flow, Robert, in an advanced state of alcoholic degradation, and Sarah, in exuberant despair, lurch impulsively from high to high and bear the blows they give and take for love. “Life,” he tells her, “is a series of suicides, divorces, promises broken, children smashed, whatever,” and the controlled yet agonized performances raise the self-pitying asides to Beckett-like poetry for the shipwrecked survivors of the Tuxedo Age. Released in 1984.—R.B. (BAM; Nov. 19.)

MARTIAN CHILD

A touching, heartfelt, clever near-miss. The tale of David Gordon (John Cusack), a science-fiction writer and grieving widower who adopts Dennis (Bobby Coleman), a brilliant oddball, has enough integrity to make its flaws all the more obvious. The boy insists, disturbingly, that he is from Mars—and has the quirks to back the claim up. Coleman is extraordinarily credible as a little genius; in his scenes with Cusack, the filial relationship grows plausibly and movingly, thanks to the perceptive eye of the director, Menno Meyjes, and the cinematographer, Robert Yeoman. The script, by Seth Bass and Jonathan Tolins, based on a novel by David Gerrold, offers irresistibly heartwarming, tear-jerking, stand-up-and-cheer moments, but Meyjes never conjures a world, inner or outer, so the result is just a string of effective scenes. Nonetheless, a charming Martian dance, a memorable use of M&M’s, and several stunning missed connections suggest the heights that this tender drama could have scaled.—R.B. (In wide release.)

MICHAEL CLAYTON

A gabby, irresistibly entertaining New York thriller. Michael Clayton (George Clooney), a law-firm fixer of dubious ethics, is dispatched to rein in the firm’s chief litigator (Tom Wilkinson), a high-strung guy who has discovered a document that incriminates one of the firm’s clients and has responded by going off his meds and out of his mind. Michael, it turns out, is only slightly less disgusted by the dirty business than the litigator is, and the movie catches him during a period of four frantic days in which all the strains in his life are pushing him to the breaking point. The screenwriter Tony Gilroy both wrote and directed the movie, and he keeps the tension level high—too high at times; the movie needs to breathe more. Yet the inside-the-law-firm chatter and poker-table badinage come off superbly. Clooney, looking a little haggard, gives a lovely performance as a smart man who has a few too many scruples to be a winner.—D.D. (10/8/07) (In wide release.)

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN

The new Coen brothers movie is adapted from Cormac McCarthy’s novel of the same name. Javier Bardem, his menace half-masked by a comical haircut, plays a calm, unstoppable psychopath on the trail of a stolen two million dollars. (His presence is both frightening and entertaining, if never wholly credible.) Various unfortunates cross his path and suffer the consequences, but his principal target is Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), a passing hunter who took the money. Following them both is Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), who seems in no particular hurry, and whose ruminations on crimes past and present committed in this desolate part of Texas are spoken in a gravelly voice-over. The movie, photographed by Roger Deakins, is almost stately in its ominous control, drawing us into the minutiae of mayhem and revenge; what other filmmakers would devote an extended scene to the stashing of booty in a ventilation shaft? The result is oddly unemotional, as if a vicious game were being played by solemn rules, with barely a flicker of interest in the characters’ moral plight. Only Kelly Macdonald, in her beautifully judged (and accented) performance as Moss’s wife, begins to restore the balance. With Woody Harrelson.—A.L. (11/12/07) (In wide release.)

WE OWN THE NIGHT

The new film by James Gray feels like a companion piece to “The Yards,” his earlier, equally dark saga of crime and domestic discord in New York. Both films star Joaquin Phoenix and Mark Wahlberg; in the first film, they played best friends, and this time they’re brothers—closer in blood but painfully divided by the course of their lives. Bobby (Phoenix) runs a night club, while Joseph (Wahlberg), following in the stern footsteps of his father (Robert Duvall), is a Brooklyn cop. When Bobby is asked to help entrap a Russian drug lord, he finds himself being pulled away from the good times (this is 1988) and back into his family, to the dismay of his girlfriend, Amada (Eva Mendes). The moral motion of the film is fairly simple—the return and redemption of a prodigal son—but Gray steeps his tale in murky complication, and the staging of every scene, be it downbeat or frantic, is so assured that you barely notice the implausibilities. (Bobby and Joseph, for instance, hardly look like brothers.) The rain-drenched car chase, halfway through, is reason enough to see the film.—A.L. (10/22/07) (In wide release.)